by Marketing Prowess
The sheer volume of traffic that search engines drive to your sites can dramatically effect your business. SEO is an activity that every marketer should have on his or her radar. We have assembled a list of 13 tips that marketers and CMOs should know. In addition to our own commentary we compiled a list of other websites, experts, books and blog posts that offer a wealth of extremely valuable information. We encourage you to visit these sites and start compiling your own list of tools and sources.
1. Stay Current on Search Engine Optimization If you are reading this post you are already on the right path. Search engine marketing and SEO is rapidly changing. What works today, may not work tomorrow. The advents of universal search, local search, and new sites or competitors make SEO fast moving. Stay on top of the most up-to-date trends by subscribing to key blogs and RSS Feeds by the top influencers in the field. At the end of this post check out the additional resource section for a complete list of websites, books, blogs, and other worthwhile tools.
2. Back Linking In short, the more qualified back links you have pointing to different parts of your site, the better. However, make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible, don’t just focus on your homepage. Good back links from other high ranking sites are used a barometer to gauge your site’s credibility. Backlinks show the search engines that other websites value your site’s content. Aaron Wall’s post of 101 Link Building Tips offers a ton of good ways to generate content that is link friendly One note of caution, recently there has been a lot of buzz regarding paid links. Google’s official stance is against paid links, and Matt Cutts of Google has publicly acknowledged the company’s disdain for paid links. If you are going to by links…. proceed with caution.
3. Alt Tags One of the first lessons in SEO 101 is to include accurate, key word focused descriptions for all your images in the alt tags. In addition to getting ancillary traffic directly through image searches (Google Image Search), this will benefit readers who use text only web browsers, overall alt tags have several SEO friendly benefits.
4. Keyword density Keyword density is the percentage of key words (total words/key word phrase) on a web page. Several experts note that this is an important factor in determining if a web page is relevant to a specified keyword or keyword phrase. There are varying opinions on what percentage, but several authors including SEO Mix advise title keyword density of around 50%, and no greater than 75%. If your primary keyphrase is three words long, you many wish to add another three-word phrase to your title, consisting of secondary keywords. It is important to strike a good balance between readability and keyword density.
5. Site Maps Whether you are a marketer for a small company or a larger corporation, your website should include a site map. Simply put- spiders won’t index pages that can’t be crawled. The site map is a tool that helps spiders find the most important pages on your site. The site map will also help the search engines understand your site’s hierarchy. Larger sites with an established site structure should make several site map pages. Keep each one should include less than 125 links.
6. Podcasts While not exclusively a SEO tip, tagging podcasts will add value to your site and are also an easy way to provide additional detail and personalization around your company. Several companies are using podcasts as retention tools, value adds for visitors, and they are also being streamed for listening on the web. Podcast files are fully searchable via iTunes, this can drive additional traffic to your site. According to John Jantsch author of Duct Tape Marketing “podcasting is still unique enough in many industries that it can allow you to stand out a bit.â€
7. Flash on Your Site Plain and simple, search engine don’t like Flash. If your site is predominately running Flash you should know that it is a difficult platform from which to optimize. More and more developers are now using CSS streamlined video in place of Flash. If you have to use Flash, be sure to optimize the page with other content. Eric Lander from Search Engine Journal has some additional information on Flash and there is a great post on Duct Tape Marketing regarding Flash and SEO.
8. Hidden Text and Black Hat Techniques Hidden text and other Black Hat Techniques can get you banned from search engines. What is black hat? According to Wikipedia black hat is a class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Hidden text is an old black hat technique that involves making font color the same as the background color, so that your visitors are not able to see the wording. A simple way to check if sites are doing this is to press Ctrl A. Another black hat tool is placing content on the page that no one would see but the search engines. As you can imagine search engines don’t like this….if you are using these tactics proceed with caution!
9. Stock Product Descriptions If you are selling products then try to avoid using the standard manufacturer provider product descriptions. Customized descriptions with additional information can be a major factor in differentiating your content from others. Try exploring avenues which allow your customers to comment and create content about these products- this can build community plus give you some SEO benefits. Creating unique descriptions can be time consuming but the keyword-focused descriptions can help your SERPs.
10. Directories One popular strategy to get your site quickly indexed and to be listed among of competing sites is by submitting it to directories. Yahoo directory, Open Directory Project (DMOZ), and other vertical directories could be useful tactics. Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Watch offers a great article discussing the directory submission process.
11. Leverage Social Media Social media and tools such as Digg, Stumbleupon, del.icio.us, reddit, can drive traffic to a site and expose your content to other publishers. This is prime link bait. The aforementioned sites as well as other niche tagging sites can add credibility to your site and expand the exposure of your content. Here is an interesting post from SEO Unique Blog that outlines ways to leverage Stumble Upon to increase page rank.
12. User Friendly URLs Use dashes between words not underscores. Several experts advise using dashes not underscores. An underscore _ is recognized as a character not a space divider. Matt Cutts of Google. I would recommend using dashes over underscores.
13. Content We saved the best for last. Content is King. Providing good quality content on a website should be standard regardless of your SEO strategy. Matt Cutts of Google confirmed this, and countless others have agreed. If you want to create a valuable site, that consistently ranks well, then develop new, high quality content that is very key word focused. According to SEO Theory.com one way to ensure that you are consistently developing new fresh content is to set a goal to add 5 pages of content to your site every week. Stay focused, develop good content, and offer value for your readers.
